Leaving Art

<div>Since the 1970s the performance and conceptual artist Suzanne Lacy has explored women's lives and experiences as well as race ethnicity aging economic disparities and violence through her pioneering community-based art. Combining aesthetics and politics and often collaborating with other artists and community organizations she has staged large-scale public art projects sometimes involving hundreds of participants. Lacy has consistently written about her work: planning describing and analyzing it; advocating socially engaged art practices; theorizing the relationship between art and social intervention; and questioning the boundaries separating high art from popular participation. By bringing together thirty texts that Lacy has written since 1974 <i>Leaving Art</i> offers an intimate look at the development of feminist conceptual and performance art since those movements' formative years. In the introduction the art historian Moira Roth provides a helpful overview of Lacy's art and writing which in the afterword the cultural theorist Kerstin Mey situates in relation to contemporary public art practices.</div>